"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

This Day in History: Jul 9, 1915: Germans surrender Southwest Africa to Union of South Africa

On this day in 1915, with the Central Powers pressing their advantage on the Western Front during World War I,
the Allies score a distant victory, when mi

Military forces of the Union
of South Africa accept a German surrender in the territory of Southwest
Africa.
The Union of South Africa, a united self-governing dominion of the
British empire, was officially established by an act of the British
Parliament in 1910. When World War I broke out in Europe in the summer
of 1914, South African Prime Minister Louis Botha immediately pledged
full support for Britain. Botha and Minister of Defense Jan Smuts, both
generals and former Boer commanders, were looking to extend the Union s
borders further on the continent. Invading German Southwest Africa would
not only aid the British–it would also help to accomplish that goal.
The plan angered a portion of South Africa s ruling Afrikaner (or Boer)
population, who were still resentful of their defeat, at the hands of
the British, in the Boer War of 1899-1902 and were angered by their
government s support of Britain against Germany, which had been pro-Boer
in the Boer War.

Several major military leaders resigned over their opposition to the
invasion of the German territory and open rebellion broke out in October
1914; it was quashed in December. The conquest of Southwest Africa,
carried out by a South African Defense Force of nearly 50,000 men, was
completed in only six months, culminating in the German surrender on
July 9, 1915. Sixteen days later, South Africa annexed the territory.

At the Versailles peace conference in 1919, Smuts and Botha argued
successfully for a formal Union mandate over Southwest Africa, one of
the many commissions granted at the conference to member states of the
new League of Nations allowing them to establish their own governments
in former German territories. In the years to come, South Africa did not
easily relinquish its hold on the territory, not even in the wake of
the Second World War, when the United Nations took over the mandates in
Africa and gave all other territories their independence. Only in 1990
did South Africa finally welcome a new, independent Namibia as its
neighbor.